Looking for background information for some of the stories I’ve collected for Culture Leicestershire’s My Jewellery, My Story project, I’ve read articles on why the Vikings might have disappeared from Greenland, the death rituals of Bronze Age people in Britain, and about whether the practice of using Whitby jet to make mourning jewellery might possibly have pre-dated the Victorian era – all well within my spectrum of interests as a history lover and writer on heritage topics.

What I’d not expected to be doing was learning about the jewellery-making habits of a pop-icon’s international fan base. But that’s exactly what I did, to support the story of one such fan who showed us the collection of friendship bracelets she’d made for – and swapped at – the recent run of UK concerts staged by Taylor Swift. I knew absolutely nothing about the phenomena before hearing her story, but intrigued and needing potential background information for the project’s exhibition boards, I did some research on the internet and put the following together:

Taylor Swift fans took the lyric ‘make the bracelet’ in the song ‘You’re on Your Own, Kid’ to heart for her 2023-2024 Eras tour, turning up to concerts wearing armfuls of friendship bracelets, home-made with coloured beads, charms and lettering that spelt out Swift-themed messages. The fans – or ‘Swifties’ – chatted and traded bracelets with each other as a token of friendship and their shared love for the artist.

‘Eras’ was Swift’s sixth headlining concert tour and the highest-grossing tour by any artist of all time. The British leg of the tour created a boom in the UK economy, with craft retailer Hobbycraft alone seeing a six-times boost in the sales of alphabet beads.

As I polished off the text, editing it down as tightly as possible, I suddenly remembered the friendship bracelet made for me when I left a teaching post back in 2012, by members of the young writers’ group I ran at lunchtimes. It was the first group I ever led, the first tentative step into what I wanted to do in life (to help others write with creative freedom) and starting, as the saying suggests, from ‘where you are now’; in other words, the school I already worked in. It took the youngsters some time to get used to the ‘creative freedom’ bit – ‘you mean, I can write anything, however I like?’ – but they did, and they loved it. Creative freedom – something that seems to be close to Ms Swift’s heart.

And though not a Taylor Swift-level fanbase, those young uns were my first writerly fans and made me a bracelet with one of the staff one day, giving it to me at the leaving assembly.

The stretchy string broke some time ago, but I still have the beads, threaded on a piece of cotton, beside my desk. And I can assure you, I’ll not be swapping it with anyone.

Would you like to share a memory or personal story about what jewellery means to you with the My Jewellery, My Story project? You can find out how to do that here.